The Cetagandan Generation Drama

[extrapenguin]

Audience

The Generation Drama, though depicting ghem family interaction, was mostly a phenomenon of the commoners. The shows did have a smallish following among ghem circles, especially in the lower echelons, but most ghem preferred their own poetry writing and other entertainment. Still, a surprising amount admitted to watching Generation Dramas as a guilty pleasure.

The commoners had no qualms about embracing the phenomenon that was the Generation Drama. After all, who doesn't want to dream of belonging to the upper classes?

Characters:

The Lovers	A young man and woman, madly in love. Two alternatives: the man seeks to impress the woman’s family of his worthiness as a husband, or the woman seeks to impress the man’s family of her worthiness to join them. The genders can be either way, so they are typically referred to as the Outside Lover and the Inside Lover.
The General	The father of the Inside Lover. Old-fashioned, sees the Outside Lover as a waste of time. Often convinced of the error of his ways by the Butler or the Cook, rarely the Wife.
The Wife	The mother of the Inside Lover. Old-fashioned and distant, though slightly more sympathetic to the Outside Lover. The character whose attitudes are the most prone to vary in different productions.
The Lieutenant	The General’s aide. Madly in love with the Empire, and sees being the General’s catamite as being a logical move in serving the Empire.
The Butler	The confidante of the household, offering counsel to the Inside Lover, the General, and the Wife.
The Cook	Firmly on the side of the Lovers, prone to leaning on the Butler to help them. Occasionally tries to manipulate the General by telling elaborate stories of the benefits of marriages of true love.
Servants	Primarily concerned with doing their tasks, they generally advocate for the Lovers.

Plot

The Lovers meet and fall in love. The Inside Lover then tells his or her parents (the General and the Wife) of the Outside Lover. Occasionally, the Outside Lover is invited for an appraisal. In any case, the Lovers’ love is shot down, and the General states that the Inside Lover must marry someone selected by the family.

The Inside Lover then angsts to the Cook or the Butler. They offer comfort, and advise the Inside Lover to have the Outside Lover act as the most virtuous and capable individual of their gender. The Inside Lover tells the Outside Lover, and the Outside Lover agrees.

 

During the middle part of the plot, the Inside Lover often sneaks to meet the Outside Lover with the help of the servants, and the General begins to get doubts. He seeks the advice of the Butler, who recommends letting the Lovers be together, and the Lieutenant, who thinks that the Inside Lover should, if male, join the military, and if female, marry someone in the military, and otherwise advocates blind loyalty and tradition. The Wife comforts the Inside Lover, and tells him or her that one can’t always get what one wants, but wanting isn’t bad. During this segment, regular life in the household may be shown.

 

Eventually, either due to long thoughts about discussions with the Butler or due to the Outside Lover proving his or her worth somehow, the General relents and lets the Lovers marry. A traditional Cetagandan wedding celebration is then held, complete with gifts of poetry. Alternatively, the Lovers are betrothed, with the expectation that they’ll marry in a few decades’ time.

 

Early developments and rise

The Generation Drama phenomenon started with the serial Heart Without Home, running for 2 seasons of 12 episodes, total runtime 24h. It codified many of the Generation Drama’s popular tropes, as well as the general formula. It also included the General’s mistress, who was vaguely sympathetic to the Lovers. Some of the earliest Generation Dramas had the Mistress as a role, but it was all but forgotten by the time of the Generation Drama’s glory days.

Even early on, it was clear that the Generation Drama was more fitting for a two- to three-hour standalone (“film”, “movie”, “vid”) than the format of the many-season serial (“series”). Early copiers attempted to add ghem poetry in, as a way of having the Outside Lover convince the General, though such attempts were short-lived, as the sizeable commoner audience didn’t appreciate them, and preferred Dramas with no such poetry. Perhaps the most well-made example is the standalone Zygomatic Arch of Love, released to widespread critical acclaim.

 

Golden Age

Some 60 years after Heart Without Home ended began the Golden Age, when all the standalone production houses produced mainly Generation Dramas, with everything else being a distinct minority, and often fused with a Generation Drama. From this were born several sub-genres of Generation Drama: musical versions (Tracing Lovers), tragedies (Songs from the Inside Lover), comedies (What Measure a General), horror flicks (Opening the Door Myself with a Chainsaw series), and many more, including the most popular of them all, hurt/comfort (I Hate It When You Cry).

 

During this time, the most famous and popular straight Generation Dramas were produced, listed here in chronological order: Shining Beyond Belief, début of director Coen Vargiss and several soon-famous actors, Interplanetary, where the Outside Lover was from a different planet, and the Lovers thus had a deadline to get married, Cherry Blossoms of Eta Ceta, where the conflict is solved by the General dying (flowers are a popular Cetagandan metaphor for the frailty of life), and Forces of Attraction, where a large part of the standalone consists of explicit sex, mostly between the General and the Lieutenant.

 

Rules of Engagement and eventual decline

After half a century of Golden Age, and more Generation Dramas than a sane person could watch in a lifetime, director Coen Vargiss announced an ambitious project: the Generation Drama to top all Generation Dramas. Many doubted that he could do something to top his own Shining Beyond Belief, especially with a serial, though once he announced his cast, the doubts began to be replaced with excitement. Indeed, while the analysis of Rules of Engagement is well outside the scope of this paper, Vargiss outdid himself. Rules of Engagement is a deconstruction of nearly all of the popular tropes of the Generation Drama, a study on the possibility of consent in asymmetries of power, an exploration of a woman’s place in ghem society, a protest of commoners’ suppression, and an acting tour de force.

 

After Rules of Engagement ended its six-year run, and even during it, there was a significant decline of Generation Dramas. The common narrative has held that Rules of Engagement was the single force that caused this, but the signs were visible earlier: the common Cetagandan was getting bored of the Generation Drama. After all, it had been one of the most common plots for almost a full century.

 

Had Rules of Engagement not happened, the Generation Drama would have died a slow death. With Rules of Engagement, the Generation Drama had a fitting last hurrah, finally returning back to its original serial format before falling out of fashion.

 

After the fall

Soon after Rules of Engagement ended came the invasion of Barrayar, which captured the Cetagandan imagination and fueled many factually incorrect fantastical serials and standalones. After the Cetagandans were driven back, their entertainment industry again spun around, unsure of itself, importing things from abroad, then fractured and diversified into many different genres. As of this writing, the most common genre is space opera.

The Generation Drama is undergoing a small resurrection, courtesy of the Escobaran director Steven Stardakatsi, whose newest standalone, Waiting for Eternity, is a reconstruction of the Generation Drama’s tropes, with the added scandal of the female Outside Lover being a commoner. Just as with the original Heart Without Home, Waiting for Eternity has inspired a slew of copycats.